Cyan does the Star Wars thing

One of the quiet background realities of the Star Wars galaxy is that it is spectacularly bad at labor. Not just “late-stage capitalism” bad, but structurally, culturally, and institutionally allergic to the idea that workers should have enforceable protections. You’ve got child soldiers, child labor, debt slavery, corporate fiefdoms, and a Republic that can field a galaxy-spanning bureaucracy but somehow never gets around to standardizing “maybe don’t enslave people.” The Empire of course doesn’t fix this; it industrializes it.

So in that environment, formal labor law is either nonexistent, unenforced, or actively hostile. Which means if you’re operating in a sector where the state either can’t or won’t protect you, you get a classic historical pattern: workers build their own rules.

Enter the gray economies.

Groups like the Smugglers' Alliance (Legends) and the Bounty Hunters' Guild (new canon) look, at first glance, like professional associations for criminals. But if you squint at them through a labor history lens, they start to look a lot like early, proto-union structures — especially the kinds you see in maritime or extralegal industries on Earth.

Think pirate codes (yes actual ones, Pirates of the Caribbean didn't make that up). Think matelotage agreements. Think dockworker brotherhoods that predate formal unions.

Because what do these groups actually do?

They:

set norms for compensation and contracts

regulate competition to prevent destructive undercutting

provide a framework for dispute resolution

establish reputational systems (“you don’t honor contracts, you don’t get work”)

That’s industry self-governance in the absence of law.

Take bounty hunting. Without something like the Bounty Hunters' Guild, the field collapses into chaos: clients don’t pay; hunters underbid each other into oblivion; jobs get duplicated, interfered with, or sabotaged. And nobody trusts anybody!

The Guild steps in and says: here are the rules of engagement. Here’s how claims work. Here’s how you get paid. Here’s what happens if you break contract.

That’s basically a union crossed with a licensing board and a regulatory agency, just without any moral pretense.

Same with the Smugglers' Alliance. Smuggling is inherently risky, decentralized, and dependent on trust networks. If everyone is constantly betraying everyone else, the whole system stops functioning. So instead, you hash out agreed-upon routes and territories, informal protections against betrayal, mechanisms for information sharing, and consequences for breaking the code

Again: not altruism. Stability.

And the reason this emerges specifically in gray/illegal sectors is because they have to. The Core Worlds might pretend they have laws, but those laws don’t meaningfully protect the people actually doing dangerous, itinerant, high-risk work. So the margins of the galaxy — where enforcement is weakest and risk is highest — become the places where labor organization evolves first.

Which is very historically grounded.

On Earth, some of the earliest labor protections didn’t come from governments; they came from workers in dangerous, decentralized industries—sailors, pirates, miners—who literally wrote their own rules because no one else was going to save them.

Pirate codes, for example, often included:

compensation for injury

shared distribution of loot

limits on captain authority

Which is … shockingly progressive compared to a lot of contemporary working conditions (cough Amazon cough).

So in the galaxy far, far away, you end up with this ironic inversion:

The “legitimate” systems — Republic, Empire, megacorporations — are exploitative, inconsistent, or indifferent.

The “illegitimate” systems — smugglers, bounty hunters — are the ones building functional labor frameworks, because they need to survive.

And that feeds back into why the galaxy feels so unstable overall. There’s no universal baseline of rights. Everything is hyper-local, network-dependent, and contingent on whether you’re inside a system that has rules you can rely on.

If you’re a clone trooper? You are literally property.

If you’re a factory worker on a corporate world? Your protections are whatever your employer feels like offering.

But if you’re a smuggler or a bounty hunter?

You might actually have clearer expectations about your pay, your risks, and your recourse — because your “union” is the only thing standing between you and total chaos.

So yeah: the Smugglers’ Alliance and the Bounty Hunters’ Guild aren’t just flavor. They’re a glimpse of what labor organization looks like in a galaxy where the state has fundamentally failed to provide it.

the audio is from "How the Grinch Stole Christmas Read by James Arnold Taylor (the voice of Obi-Wan Kenobi) and Corey Burton (the voices of Cad Bane and Ziro the Hutt)" by James Arnold Taylor on YouTube

Clones!

I've had a few folks at conventions say I ought to do some clone trooper art, and when I had this idea for The Vitruvian Clone I knew I had to draw it. Drawn in alcohol markers, fineliners and coloured pencil, with a little stock image assistance for the background.

So much about Naboo culture is infuriating from a logical standpoint. They have a queen, okay. A constitutionally elected queen? Weird, okay. Don't know why they'd do that but... She's FOURTEEN? Excuse me? Is it a ceremonial thing or, oh no it's not? Legit head of state? Why does she dress like that? Why does she talk like that? I'm so tired.

Here's the explainer. Let me go cook.

There's this joke in Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy where the last living human goes back in time and finds out humans aren't actually from Earth, but an alien culture that tricked all the middle managers, pedantic weirdos, and other infuriating folk into getting in a space arc which they gave the wrong evacuation coordinates to simply get rid of them. The Naboo are like this but they're all artists and poets and hippies, but like classy ones. They fled their home planet during a war and crash landed on Naboo, then did a colonism to the Gungans because, hey, they were fleeing a war and it was do or die. This spiritual rot in their creation story is later rectified by Padmé. But it's super important to their cultural psychology. They're hippies, but will subjugate if needed. They are "peaceful" but I guarantee you every single one of them has a tiny extremely shiny pistol up their sleeve and they will draw down on you if backed against a wall.

The scene that I think says it all is at the end of Phantom Menace when Padmé is surrounded by Nute Gunray and his droids, they've got her dead to rights, but Sabé her double creates a distraction so the queen can make it to her throne. This one piece of furniture is the Naboo in a nutshell. It's richly carved with artistic details, it has two seats to the side so the queen's handmaidens can read the lips of people in the back of the room and use hand signals to communicate with the queen while she can remain focused mostly on who is speaking to her. It is hundreds of years old. And it has a secret compartment in the armrest that is FULL OF GUNS. Layers of artistic opulence hiding their true intentions.

The Naboo were created to be backwards compatible with Princess Leia. They're compassionate pacifists, but they will shot you if needed.

Why do they elect teenage royalty? It's a little creepy. It's giving "age of consent is emotional maturity". It makes no sense.

The explanation they give outsiders is they want youthful idealism untainted by cynicism. What they don't tell you is that they take kids with stated interest in politics and put them in an advanced highly competitive Leadership Academy which is like Model UN mixed with Battle Royale. Well, they don't kill each other but it's intense. It's like what the clones went though just all diplomacy training and tea ceremonies all the time. Which is crazy but so Naboo.

Oh, and all the delegates for the royalty election run using pseudonyms for security. Imagine voting for the head of state but you can't run a background check. It's so crazy.

Why does Padmé dress like that? Well, fashion is one of Naboo's major industries so it's like she's wearing the entire Fall line catalog at once. To advertise not only the talent of her people, but to show how much they favor her. BUT that dress has multiple layers of padding and resin armor. And aforementioned spots for those little silver blasters. And it breaks up her silhouette making her harder to shoot. And it's so elaborate you pay more attention to the crazy dress and not if the person wearing it is really the queen or a decoy. Everything about Naboo is like this.

Queen Amidala has that weird accent while Padmé does not. Because all her handmaidens helped create the accent together so they all can imitate it. It's like if you gave girls at a rowdy sleepover the job of federal counterintelligence. That's what they came up with.

The handmaidens wear colorful identical clothes so you can't tell them apart, hoods to partially conceal their identity, and they don't wear the queen's fancy makeup. So one of them can be the queen and spy on people in the audience. Because the Naboo don't trust shit for shit.

Their public face is so silly to hide all the truly weird shit they do behind the scenes.

They use their reputation as artist hippies to conceal multiple layers of subterfuge and disguise their methods of self defense and assuage their paranoia due to wartime trauma and their disturbing colonial past. All of them are completely off their rocker even by Star Wars standards. And I love them so much. They put on a show so everyone thinks they have them figured out but what they have going on is far more weirder and more sinister than meets the eye. You know how catty, neurotic, and competitive art school students stereotypically are? Yeah, planet art student. Love them!

Andor: undocumented immigrants are facing sexual violence every day. left wing infighting will get everyone killed. rich people buying back things stolen by colonists is still an act of colonialism.

*goes through chancellor’s desk drawers and finds this*

Happy Ides of March!!!!

🔪🤴🗡

This is a WIP but a friend told me to mark the day with what I’ve got. So. BEHOLD! My stuff.

Tumblr is very unfriendly to horizontal art so I suggest you to click on it to see everyone 💖

KT is no Tolkien, okay. She did a decent job with the language and worldbuilding, for which I thank her from the bottom of my heart, but her pronunciations are, to put it delicately, irregular. I’m willing to tolerate some of it - but certainly not all of it.

So! On to the issue of irregularity in languages and their orthographies!

Pretty much every language has irregularity somewhere, and this includes the most aggressively “logical” and carefully designed conlangs out there. Irregularity USUALLY forms because a language needs a small number of “mega-functional” verbs before it needs its more specific and finite verbs. Most of the time, “to be” and “to be able / can / may / might / could” are irregular; this is the case in English, Latin, Welsh, and a whole bunch of other languages that are either derived from Latin or contaminated by Latin. “To go,” “to have,” “to do,” these are all also super likely candidates for irregularity in Latin-touched (if not necessarily directly Romance) languages. Go? Went. Do? Did. Be? Was. Extremely irregular! Look at how involved these verbs are in English, however, as auxiliaries to other verbs: I’m going to walk home. I didn’t think you’d be here. I haven’t been feeling well lately. With Welsh we see this auxiliary use of irregular bod, “to be,” in that it’s really common to pair the infinitive of a verb with the inflected form of “to be,” rather than to inflect the primary verb in the sentence. Welsh allows the speaker to get away with only knowing conjugations for “to be,” in most circumstances. Irregularity is a linguistic cheat sheet for new speakers of a language, granting the use of the most common auxiliary verbs as a way to substitute for knowing how to conjugate. Over time, auxiliary verb use REPLACES conjugation completely, and in fact that’s exactly what happened to English. Old English had massively complicated verb conjugations, and our irregular auxiliary usage eventually boiled our verbs down to only these: past, not-past, not-past plural, and continuous (walked, walks, walk, walking; did, does, do, doing). 

Irregular verbs are pretty much guaranteed to adhere fully to the most ordinary conventions of spelling and pronunciation their language possesses. It’s not that they are designed to “sound normal” within the language; it’s that they’re so common in the language that they dictate what sounds will survive in that language for a very long time. It’s very reasonable to suggest that the /v/ and /w/ sounds in English have remained distinct specifically because they are separate sounds in “have, had, has,” and “was, were.” The verb “get” keeps its hard /g/ sound instead of sounding like the letter g in “genuine,” because “get” is such a common irregular verb.

Which verbs are spelled weird for how they sound, in a language, though? Which ones “break the orthography rules?” 

Foreign verbs. Loanwords. 

Real quick, let’s look at all strictly-canonical examples of double-o and double-e in the Mando’a lexicon.

goorar - to throw (the word for grenade is related)

keenir - to infiltrate

sooranir - to suck, absorb, draw up liquid (used in a common insult)

utreekov; ut’reeyah- emptyheaded; empty

That’s it; that’s all of them. Do any of those look like auxiliary verbs, words that would be necessary at the initial development of a language? Nahhhh. Do they look like verbs that could have come from somewhere else? Sure! English has lots of words for throw, for example: pitch, toss, hurl, chuck, throw, lob, pass, propel, bowl, cast, hurl, fling, sling, and I’m not even scratching the surface. A solid half of these come from non-Germanic sources, with ‘propel’ being the most obviously Latin-derived of the lot. Infiltrate is a super specialised verb; it doesn’t have a lot of uses outside its specific context. Suck / absorb is fairly specialised, too, and the adjective ‘empty’ has a few Mando’a synonyms that would be moderately interchangeable (or at least acceptable in the same placement). 

Therefore, I propose this notion: these three verbs and one adjective are not irregularities in the sense of language-internal irregularity of inflection, orthography, and pronunciation; instead, they are loanwords acquired from another language that Mando’a had contact with, and the Mandalorians simply conserved the original spelling from that other language, or adjusted it minimally enough to make the verbs “look like verbs” (adding -ar and -ir to the end).

This shows up all the time in languages that have high contact with each other: they borrow each other’s words and conserve some of the original spelling so that their own speakers can tell it’s a loanword.

she'eta - 50, pronounced “shayta,” is our only remaining example of double e in Mandalorian, and it has derivation from other number words, in which neither of those ‘e’ is pronounced /i/ like in other instances of ‘ee.’ We can trust this word is “original Mandalorian,” because it maintains that ‘e’ and ‘ee’ are both pronounced /e/, or /e ʔ e/ if we’re being very generous about that middle apostrophe representing a glottal stop.

Conclusion: Realistically, yes, this is just Karen Traviss making a conlanging mistake of inconsistency. That’s the Doylist approach to this, for sure. But if we want a strictly Watsonian approach, treating Mando’a as a language that evolved and had contact with other languages, then we can say it is equally realistic for instances of “ee” as /i/” and “oo” as /u/ to just be loanwords adapted into Mando’a. 

Also, “vacuum” in classical Latin would have been /,wa'kwu:m/ not /’vak,ju əm/. Double vowels in Latin get the heavy stress within the word, and “uu” was pretty much /wu/ with that /u/ being extra long. The temptation to put the stress on the first syllable is a modern English convention. Welsh and Latin both love their penultimate and antepenultimate stresses, which English largely avoids when it can. This is immaterial to the soul of your post; I’m just enough of a pedant to have difficulty resisting the urge to pick at it. Just… this is literally how we got the letter W. “Double U.” Two of “u” = “wu.” 

What if:

Mando’a vowels change slightly when they are doubled/lengthened. Not enough to make them entirely separate phonemes, but noticeably so that the short vowels are more central/relaxed and the long vowels are slightly “exaggerated” in comparison.

Short i is relaxed /ɪ/, like in English “kit

Long ii is slightly higher, tighter /iː/, like in English “fleece”

Short e is relaxed /ɛ/, like in English “bed”

Long ee is slightly higher /eː/, like in Australian English “bed”—look, English e’s don’t vary very systematically so it’s hard to do this “like English thing”

Short a is central /ɐ/, like in English “nut” or /ʌ/ like English “strut”

Long aa is back /ɑː/, like in English “father”

Short u is /ʊ/, like in English “foot”

Long u is /uː/, like in English “goose”

Short o is /ɔ/

Long oo is ever so slightly higher, not quite u but half a step in that direction, /oː/

Some speakers, especially of Kalevalan/Sundari dialects which have been influenced by Galactic Basic, pronounce unstressed short vowels even more centrally, as /ə/

Tl;dr: the front vowels get fronter, back vowels backer, everything gets slightly raised. But native speakers still perceive them as the same sounds. This system is btw very much inspired by Swedish phonology (but has a smaller number of vowels), if anyone is wondering. Go to the Wikipedia Swedish Phonology page, and you can listen to examples.

Apparently my first idea for long/short vowels had been to raise the short vowels, like Māori does. But that didn’t really work with the given pronunciations, so I flipped them, raising the long vowels instead. Which is indeed the system used by Swedish (which I’ve been reading lately, so that’s probably where the brain fart came from)—but also by some English dialects, incidentally including dialects in the Northumberland area. And that made a something click in my brain, as I had recently reposted this post about Geordie or Tyneside English inspiration in Mando’a. (And please point out any mistakes in the following, as I’m certainly no expert on English dialects!)

So I went and looked up dialects in this area. And here’s what I found (all emphases mine):

Consonants

Mando’a sounds were influenced by Latin and Hungarian. Here’s what Karen Traviss says:

“Jess had to create lyrics that could be sung, because that was his primary objective, so he needed to get syllables to fit rhythms. But I needed to reconcile that with a structured grammar. Jess shared his thoughts with me about how he developed the sounds and I stuck with that softer sound he’d created. He took his sounds from Latin and Hungarian, and I added on some sounds from Urdu, Gurkhali and even Romany. I gave it a Hebrew rhythm and the end result sounds almost like Russian and Gaelic crossed with Hebrew.”

—Karen Traviss in Inside Mando’a Culture and Language

You know what Mando’a vowels look like? They look like this:

Distribution of Latin vowels according to William Sidney Allen’s Vox Latina, p. 47. By Nicodene.

They look like Latin vowels, not like English ones.

Classical Latin short vowels /i e o u/ were probably pronounced with a relatively open quality, something like [ɪ] [ɛ] [ɔ] [ʊ] & the long vowels with a relatively close quality, something like [iː] [eː] [oː] [uː].

Classical Latin short vowel /i/ was similar in quality to the long /eː/ and the short /u/ was similar to the long /oː/. This is suggested by attested misspellings. — That explains why Mando’a spellings <ee> and <oo> are give pronunciations as “ee” (in English orthography) = /i/ and “oo” (English orthography) = /u/.

Hungarian has a different vowel system (with more than 5 vowels for one), but it too shows a similar phenomenon where long vowels are slightly higher than their short counterparts.

This has implications for Mando’a diphthongs as well, if we assume they were similarly influenced by the languages Mando’a was inspired by. I do not have the energy to write that analysis just now (because it ties to some other issues like palatals).

Mando’a phonotactics also show a clear inspiration from Latin, which Traviss apparently also knows.